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Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!
WildCATs – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order
New for Patrons: Guide to Brigade
I have another new guide for all Patrons of CK and, weirdly, this guide for a little known Image Launch title with few lasting fans is a big inspiration for expanding my indie comics coverage. Welcome to a guide about the Image Comics launch book from Rob Liefeld you’ve probably never heard of in my Guide to Brigade!
If you recall Brigade from the 90s, you’d have to have been a major fan of the mythology of Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood. And, if the amount of information on the internet about this comic is any indication, there ain’t a whole lot of those major fans out there.
Brigade was the fifth comic launched by Image in 1992, and the second from Liefeld’s Extreme Studios. His Youngblood were positioned as a government-sanctioned super-team that doubled as major media stars. Brigade was the dark flipside of that. Its leader, Bloodstone, was a World War 2 veteran who served, died, and served again thanks to the Image Comics version of a super soldier serum. He once led Youngblood, but left in disgrace after the accidental death of one of his team members at his own hands.
Despite it all, Battlestone never gave up on fighting the good fight for justice – he just fights it from a different angle now with his own vigilante team.
I made that sound really cool, right? Like a disgraced Captain America leading the Dark Avengers a full five years prior to the debut of Thunderbolts (rather than fancy boy Iron Man leading a bunch of high-profile Avengers slumming it in Force Works, which was still two years after the launch of Brigade).
So, why don’t we recall this comic as the flipside of Youngblood the way we do with the conjoined pair of WildCats & Stormwatch? [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Brigade
Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order
New for Patrons: Guide to WildCATs (& WildStorm Events!)
I’m back with another Indie Comics Month guide for all Patrons of CK! This is the guide that was the first itch I had to create indie comics guides more than six years ago when I first launched mu Patreon campaign! At the time, I couldn’t believe that anyone would spend time on a guide page for an Image launch title from 1992 whose comics continuity was dead in the water. Now it has a hot new book to its name in the main DC Universe! That’s right, it’s time for a guide to Image’s fourth flagship title, the co-flagship of Jim Lee’s WildStorm imprint that later joined him at DC Comics. It’s a brand new Guide to WildCATs.
(Bonus: I also launched a quick Guide to WildStorm Events with every line-wide event in reading order.)
I know this material well, not only because I loved WildCATs back in the 90s, but because I was in the middle of putting together a complete run of WildCATs for binding when we moved to New Zealand! I have personally hunted down every issue in this guide without the help of a guide. This is a page that held absolutely no surprises for me.
That’s not the case for WildCATs itself, which I think is a book that would surprise a lot of people if they read beyond the famous first thirteen issues by Jim Lee. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to WildCATs (& WildStorm Events!)